Dope 🔥🔥🔥🔥 @uchennaofficial ... we have a story, Jesus take the glory for what we have become. I get high on the word and I’m happily addicted. Oshey!!! It’s a take over. God bless you fellow soldier. #dope#high#spiritualaddiction

^becoming real^
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"Real isn't how you were made, it's a thing that happens to you..." A passage in the Velveteen Rabbit that has stayed by my side this year though thick and thin, a north star, if you will.
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2017 pretty much began in a continued state of collapse and annihilation of everything in my life and all that I thought that I was. Backing up though, the last 6 months of 2016 were when the annihilation began from my work, to ending a partnership, losing a community and people I thought were friends, and then coming head on with my addictions that were born out of a deep soul starvation I had been ignoring for way too long.
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It's been a year of in-between space. Not a lot of rebuilding, but a lot of letting go and retrieving of lost aspects of my soul. Everything is different. The changes have been laying the plans for a truer blueprint while my heart's been doing some heavy lifting.
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I had always been an incredibly spiritual person. I kind of thought I had spirituality covered, until I came to explore the idea that my addictions were rooted in a spiritual sickness, a disconnection FROM spirit and a deep mistrust in life and people. Whoah.
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This realization was crushing. How could I be so seriously spiritually inclined and yet be suffering from a spiritual starvation and disconnection from Spirit? I questioned every belief, practice and motive, coming head on with my spiritual ego and my relationship with spirituality as a commodity, a hobby, a thing to use in a myriad of ways to escape and a place project many of my unresolved relational issues onto Spirit and life. How much I was self-medicating my own magic because I was scared of it. It was humble sauce.
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This has been a year of getting real. Leaning into the fractured edges of my heart, the ruptured line to my soul and learning how to live inside my spirituality rather than living with it as a prop. Healing my relationship with my soul, with Spirit and life has changed every single thing and brought me, of course, closer and closer to knowing real, true, unconditional love for myself. The real, sustainable, relaxed kind.
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(Continued in comments)

^spiritual practice is not a weapon^
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I've been in a super funk over the last few days and have been trying to do all the "things" to shift my state and feel better. Nothing was working and, in fact, I was sinking deeper into it and feeling super frustrated. I wanted to feel better. Then, I realized something that I've thought of before. Peering under the surface, there is some odd belief that I shouldn't be feeling whatever it is that I'm feeling or struggling with whatever subconscious block is up. I have so many spiritual tools and when these moments it, it's like the tools become an arsenal that I use in a way to get rid of or attack the parts of myself that seem like they aren't okay. Sometimes it works, most of the time it makes spiritual "light" work feel like a struggle or that something deeper is wrong with me because I don't feel bright and shiny right away.
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It's something that I've noticed in sessions with clients who come with a lot of feelings and this desire that we clear them or remove whatever it is. This is like a Western approach of pathologizing the issue and immediately applying something to get rid of the troubling symptoms. We try psychological things with spiritual maladies or spiritual tools with psychological issues and spin because there is some kind of spiritual ideal we need to get to that is devoid of emotions, pain or human experience.
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Spirituality is not meant to be a weapon against ourselves. Spiritual practice, I think, is meant to be a refuge, a place to turn to in darkness and in light for holding, nourishment, love and, yes, ultimately transformation. There is a special transformation that occurs when we step out of the way, give the ego a timeout, and bring gentleness, presence and curiosity. This isn't the same as drowning in our emotions or carrying on a pity party that perpetuates the inner states we want freedom from.
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(Continued in comments below)

There is so much movement and stimulation in most of our lives that it's quite easy to forget that life is short, our time here is this human experience as a spiritual being is a precious, precious gift. You are a precious gift. Every single part of you. Never forget that every moment is an opportunity to reset. 💖

There are days that feel so easy, filled with flow and deep connection to essence. I float on a cloud, moving through days in an easy, graceful way. There are days I feel myself clawing like a ravaged wild woman, slinging myself through the mud. Those days, life feels more wild, raw...all the roots have been pulled up, the tender old beliefs challenge any floating cloud that attempts to pass by.
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Most days are a mix of these two. The ethereal flow of essence and lightness with this raw, wild, tender energy willing to move mountains while riding pink clouds of joy and laugh-crying. It's a mad kind of joy to bring presence to this fully alive experience where shit can hit the fan while there is a storm of grace. Isn't that who we truly are at heart?
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My past is sordid, for the most part, sprinkled with 11 years of making appearances of a good doctoral student and a sober, "spiritual" woman. Mostly, I was kicking down the wild soul inside my heart, allowing a frightened part of me to create a cage while thinking I was getting free.
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I wrapped myself up in intellectual and spiritual armor. My true defense was allowing my wild woman to tear off my spiritual clothes, burn the books and drag me through the mud with a very thorough review of my addiction to alcohol and shame. She initiated me back into myself but I had to LISTEN to her and surrender to the golden thread of my soul's journey as read in the in-between story lines of dreams hidden in the folds of my psyche. I learned what I already knew.
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She demanded I heal my relationship with source, which, ultimately, was healing my relationship my deeply rooted light and wild self. This was a retrieving of my own nature, a reclamation and renewal of the ancient vows I had once taken as a soul healer in this life. First, I had to heal mine. I had to return to the original heartbreak, regardless of what it took, to save myself.
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On Saturday, I celebrated one year of renewed sobriety. This year was the most courageous I've ever had to be, the most tender that life required of me, the most humble of heart I need to become in order to appreciate the true value of the surrender it takes to let in. 🌟

Vibration does not equal consciousness. You can engage in raising your vibration endlessly and never live in an expanded, awakened state of awareness or consciousness or even really like yourself.
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You can have a high vibration and be addicted to being "blissed out," or in a state of "all one loving consciousness" and be totally disconnected from the people around you, how you impact other people, your awareness of dysfunctional psychological patterns, connected loving-kindness, understanding and compassion.
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Focusing solely on your vibration without also tending to the resident psychic and physical structures becomes another way to serve a solidified, spiritual ego identity. .
The goal is to merge an expanded state of awareness with higher vibrational states, which is accessed through your heart, where heaven and earth meets in your body.
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Psycho-spiritual integration is essential in order to anchor in vibrational frequency with complimentary levels of conscious awareness, where the body's innate intelligence and soul and the upper centers are rowing the same boat together, at the same time. Awakening is an unlearning, a falling away of your conditioning.
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You cannot maintain a true vibrational frequency while bypassing your humanity in a way that is sustainable over time. To attain a stable vibrational state can take more time than your mind would prefer. This is a slower process to expand, heal and transform consciousness, expanding levels of awareness to encompass the totality of who you are in an experiential way and thereby embracing your humanity.
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This the time. We are all being called to birth ourselves humanly divine, to embrace every corner of our human "self" so that the divine can flow through our wide open, tender, raw, strong, courageous, passionate, sensitive, deep and mysterious human heart.

Ever wonder why we crave the wrong things and end up feeling restless, irritable and unhappy? We try to fit into this crazy jigsaw"puzzled" world because we all have that desire to feel complete and to have that heightened feeling on the inside. Isn't it interesting that even though we are spiritual beings, we find it so hard to respond to our spiritual cravings? Instead we turn to drugs, sex, entertainment, just about anything. But it's your spirit that's empty bruh. Get addicted on Christ - Get high on his addiction.
#word#stayhighonjesus#jmac#cravings#whole#spiritualaddiction#soulfood#happysunday